ASSIGNMENT

Critically analyze these lines:

“Write, for example, ‘The night is shatteredand the blue stars shiver in the distance.”

The lines mentioned above have been taken from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poem‘Tonight I Can Write…’ which is the twentieth and final love poem from his 1924 collection,Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. It is the poet’s best-known work, and remains thebest-selling poetry book in the Spanish language ever, almost 100 years after its firstpublication. The poems in this volume revolutionized the depiction of love itself: instead of adeluge of romantic sentiments, or even as something that was common and prevalent inordinary discourse, Neruda transformed the idea of love into a feast of the senses, reveling inthe physical pleasures of love and intimacy.

The poetic persona across the poems comes across as a heroic figure who tries to explore andachieve a unique voice that would enable him to actually re-interpret love, as well as come upwith a renewed engagement with that concept. In ‘Tonight I Can Write…’, the poetic personapaints a moving picture of the end of a relationship, which will eventually trail off into the“song of despair”. Unlike the other nineteen poems of love, the last one shifts its focus awayfrom the sensual nature of love to deep emotional bonds that unite lovers, and the almostunbearable sense of loss that pervades one’s psyche at the end of an affair. ‘Tonight I CanWrite…’ reads as a conglomeration of sad verses; the repetition of the first line, “Tonight Ican write the saddest lines” not only acts as self-reflective device for the poetic persona, butalso lends the poem with the feeling of a “terrible epiphany, the realization and recognition ofgreat sorrow”, according to Michael Predmore.

The self-reflective nature of the poem can also be evidenced by the line “Write, forexample…”: the poem calls attention to itself as a poem, and very self-consciously celebratesthe ability to produce art amidst anguish and sadness. A sense of great destitution is echoedthroughout the poem, mostly because of the poem’s self-awareness that it is the end result ofagonizing heartbreak. For the poetic persona, everything can be associated to his lost love,and, the night and the night sky are no exceptions. The blue stars shivering in the distancehint at not just the illuminations of the sky, but also the clear vision that dawns in his heartonce his lover is no longer there with him. In ‘Pablo Neruda: An Introduction’, Anil Dhingrahas elaborated on how the “blue stars” also represent the abject loneliness that distanceprovides and accentuates: now that there is a great distance between the lover and the poeticpersona, he cannot help but feel infinitely alone in a vast cosmos.

The loneliness gets intensified through the recurrent image of the night sky, since there issomething incredibly unreachable about its beauty, much like the beauty of the poeticpersona’s lover, and even more, the beauty of their love itself. The shattering of the night skyalso symbolizes the pent-up passion of their love, which is also the inspiration behind most ofNeruda’s poetry. Susnigdha Dey in ‘Pablo Neruda: The Poet” has articulated how it is theordinariness of the affair between the poetic persona and his lover that makes it resonate withpeople experiencing the same emotions all over the world. However, this ordinarinessreaches a “profoundly universal level” with the line “Love is so short, forgetting is so long”.This line can be read directly in connection to the second line of the poem “Write, forexample…”: since the memory of his lover refuses to leave him, he creates art in the form ofa poem in order to cleanse his mind, as a form of catharsis. Paradoxically, the poem will alsoact as a reminder throughout the ages of what passed between the two: and maybe this is whythe poetic persona feels that forgetting love is fated to be long, since the artistic spirit iscompelled to produce works of art inspired by the feeling of love, works that will survive forall of posterity as reminders of their relationship.

Thus, in “Tonight I Can Write…”, Pablo Neruda has constructed a brilliantly worded poemabout the end of a relationship. Each line conveys a deep and meaningful emotion, and acareful analysis is crucial in appreciating the carious sentiments of the poem more fully.